Introduction

Welcome to the Gracile web framework documentation!

Gracile is a thin, full-stack, web framework with:

• Portable HTML, CSS and JS, thanks to Lit (SSR).
• High responsivity during dev. and build, thanks to Vite.
• A minimal dependency footprint for its runtime and your distributable.
• Web standards friendliness, like Custom Elements (aka Web Components) or the WhatWG Fetch API.
• A streamlined Developer eXperience for building, instead of fiddling around.

Main features

Gracile is powered by Vite and Lit SSR.
It’s pretty low-scope, agnostic and can adapt easily to a variety of tech stacks.

With it, you can achieve:

• File-based routing with efficient code-splitting
• Server Side Rendering
• Static Site Generation
• Server integration (Request/Response) for Express, Hono…
• Full-stack Custom Elements (Lit), with hydration
• Content websites
• Multi or Single Page Applications
• Progressive enhancements (no JS fallbacks, smart hydration…)
• And more, via Add-ons (Markdown, Metadata, SVG…)

All that, with a few conventions, a standard-oriented approach and a very contained footprint 🤏.

Web Components, TypeScript, SASS, Lit, and other DX perks are all at your fingertips; while remaining optional.

Thanks to the Vite modular architecture, and Node.js versatility, developer experience is smoothed up across the board: in development and for production.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman’s Odyssey